To the extent that he can reason at all, Donald T. Sterling must be staring at his vaulted ceilings these days and nodding grimly at the confirmation of what he always believed.

Winning is overrated.

As the NBA’s Biggest Loser, Sterling was the incarnation of Herb Tarlek, the skirt-chasing ad salesman on “WKRP In Cincinnati,” except that Tarlek had no business touch. Sterling was the leisure suit in the league’s closet. His Clippers lost an average of 57.4 games in one 10-year span, played in the forlorn Sports Arena, and were a perfect tonic for visitors who had suffered a Laker air attack the previous night.

Sterling kept general manager Elgin Baylor through an epoch of shanked draft picks. He fired coaches more often than he changed cufflinks, and one of them, Bill Fitch, had to sue him to get his full pay.

Other owners were thankful for Sterling and a little envious, too, because he wasn’t entrapped by the lure of winning. He cut corners on salaries and kept making money. He never budged from L.A. despite David Stern’s frequent suggestions that he move to the nice new arena in Anaheim, with a hoop-hungry market. Turned out, he was much more savant than idiot.

So when he fired Baylor, and Baylor sued him for discrimination, and all kinds of vile things came into the public record, it didn’t really matter.

When he was cited for very overt racial discrimination against the tenants of his apartment buildings and all those details emerged on the way to a settlement, that didn’t matter either.

The league thought it was fine, and no player suggested a boycott, and Sterling, who didn’t talk to newspaper folk, kept bolstering the newspaper industry with his advertisements to himself, and his NAACP awards.

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The Clippers were high satire back then.

Billy Crystal was always there, if only to make people ask, “What’s Billy Crystal doing here?”

Benoit Benjamin was a 7-foot tribute to disinterest. The front office agreed to trade Danny Manning to Miami for Glen Rice, but Sterling, claiming he had just dreamed Manning had led the Clippers to a championship, scuttled the deal with Manning en route to the airport.

Those who did not care enough to come were entertained by Ralph Lawler, then and now the consummate play-by-play man, and Bill Walton, as Himself. One night Washington’s Hubert Davis was torching the Clippers from everywhere, and Walton rumbled, “Ralph, the Clippers should realize that Hubert Dagis is right-handed. And probably will be, the rest of the game.”

Then it changed. Sterling became one of three sporting tenants at the glorious new Staples Center. He wound up with basketball people who knew what they were doing. They picked Blake Griffin first-overall, and after the usual knee injury that signified Clippers luck back then, Griffin finally played, and showed he was not Darius Miles or Lorenzen Wright or Michael Olowakandi.

Money cascaded. The Clippers built a beautiful training center (as the Lakers were sharing a building with the Kings). Chris Paul arrived. Winning arrived. Doc Rivers arrived. And now Sterling wasn’t the mascot anymore.

It was no longer funny when Sterling upbraided his players from midcourt. It was no longer just a sad commentary when Sterling balked at paying for an assistant coach’s prostate cancer surgery.

And when Sterling said pretty much the same things about minorities as he always has, except in a surreptitiously recorded conversation with one of the many loves of his life, you know what happened next.

Shelly Sterling won the right to sell the Clippers to Steve Ballmer. Sterling still has a lawsuit pending against the NBA, which stripped him of the team, and he will hold onto this rope as long as he can, but it looks as if he will finally be hurt by his instincts.

Adam Silver, who followed Stern as commissioner, might win the Nobel Peace Prize for ejecting Sterling, but he had little choice. The other owners were united, and the players were threatening a boycott, and any free agent who did consider the Clippers would probably be ostracized. And the corporate sponsors, who didn’t exist in the Sports Arena days, weren’t happy.

New Clippers CEO Dick Parsons warned the jurors last week that Rivers and Paul might well leave the club if Sterling is still the owner. Parsons said that would be a “disaster.”

Rivers was the leader he is expected to be when the Sterling tape emerged during the Clippers playoffs. But it might be just a bit disingenuous for Rivers and Paul to express shock here.

They must have known that Sterling was capable of saying ‘black people smell and attract vermin,” as he did in the housing discrimination trial. They must have known that Sam Cassell, Elton Brand and Corey Maggette had told Baylor that Sterling would bring women into the locker room and encourage them to look in the shower “at those beautiful black bodies.”

They took Sterling’s money anyway.

We’ve all heard that L.A. will not tolerate a loser, but we tolerated Sterling. We all know Stern’s ferocity when dealing with the players’ union, but he enabled Sterling. The league tried to punish him for leaving San Diego and coming to L.A., but when he threatened a major suit, it backed down. He never was worth the trouble.

Maybe the Clippers will win the 2015 NBA championship and Silver can present the trophy to Ballmer or Mrs. Sterling. Donald always wanted that moment for himself. But that would have required too much winning, and winning had its own high price.